Zero Hour (Gypsy Brothers #8)

by Lili St. Germain

  CHAPTER SIX

  JASE

  My father murdered my mother when I was sixteen years old, and I was the lucky SOB who got to find her. He shot her first, not somewhere where she’d bleed to death right away, but somewhere where it’d hurt. After he shot her, he told me later, he beat her, while she begged him to stop.

  The gunshot? The beating? She would have survived them both. He didn’t want to kill her with his violence. He just wanted to make her think she might survive his fury. Even as he was killing her, he was cruel enough to make her think she had a hope of making it out alive.

  I often wonder if she knew that he was there to kill her. Maybe she’d clung to some hope that he’d just beat her to a bloody pulp as retribution for running away from him with his unborn son. With me.

  Before I’d been born, I was already the reason my mother was doomed to die.

  Sixteen fucking years and change, she evaded him. Found a group of people she could trust. Lived simply. Sent me to the local public school with a name that couldn’t be traced back to my father in any way. I didn’t even know he’d existed, not at first, not until I’d started snooping around and demanding to know who my dad was. All the other kids had dads. Even if their dads were losers or dead or cheating on their moms—they knew where they’d come from. I wanted to know why my mom had blonde hair and skin as pale as snow, and why I had these black eyes and olive skin and dark hair that didn’t match one piece of her.

  I threatened my mom. I was going to find out, one way or another, who my father was.

  So she told me, eventually. And as soon as she did—as soon as she said, Dornan Ross is your father, I wished she’d kept me in the dark. Lied to me. Your father kills people, she’d said. He’s a very, very bad man. You’re nothing like him.

  My poor dead mother and the way she believed she’d saved me from this family. You’re nothing like him.

  I’m everything like him.

  Sometimes I imagine what life would have been like if she’d lived. If they’d never found us, living peacefully, in our simple house in Colorado. Shopping at thrift stores because we had no money, eating fucking beans and the bread they marked down the day after it started to go stale, trudging to school in the snow in winter with my beaten-up sneakers that didn’t quite keep the cold, melted ice from seeping in. It was blissful fucking ignorance, and in an instant it was all taken away.

  My father murdered my mother. He shot her and beat her and finally, when he’d broken half the bones in her body, he dumped her in a bathtub and shot her up with enough heroin to kill five men.

  I like to think her death was quick. That she didn’t suffer. But I’ve watched my father kill plenty of people between then and now, and I think, the way he loved her, the way she left him when she found out she was pregnant with me? I think her death was anything but quick.

  That’s how I found her. Motionless, covered in blood, the syringe still hanging out of her pale arm. I’d been late home, that day. I don’t think it would have mattered, if I could have saved her, because even though I was late home, she was stone cold by the time I’d dragged her up out of the tub and tried to shake her back to life in my arms.

  “Mom,” I’d whispered. “Mom?”

  I shook her. I shook her so fucking hard.

  She didn’t wake up.

  “MOM!” I screamed.

  My father confronted me. I knew he was my father the moment our eyes locked; they were the same eyes I looked at when I saw myself in the mirror every morning. My eyes were his eyes, and I was so fucking angry that this was the way he’d chosen for us to meet. I’d always held this weird kind of hope that he was a good man, better than my mother had told me, but he was so much worse than she ever let on.

  “You know who I am?” he asked me.

  I opened my mouth. Closed it again. Looked down at my mother, who I was still holding onto. I remember how slippery she was, how she had so much blood on her that it’d never all dry. Most of all, I remember the rage that consumed me when I saw what he’d done to her.

  I launched at him. Even then, as I punched and kicked and rained down blows on him, an unsettling realization was creeping into my gut. He wasn’t just my father. He was the thing in my nightmares, the promise of what I’d one day become. The darkness I’d been trying to resist my whole life, when I looked at the hollow of a girl’s neck and marveled how my palm would cut off her breath just like that. The thing inside me that enjoyed the sight of blood, the thing that drove me to fight and drink and hurt people. My mother might have been my solace in the first sector of my life, some kind of earth angel who called me back from the reality of the Ross blood surging through my veins, but when I stared into my father’s eyes for the first time, all I saw was my worst self.

  He’d overpowered me so easily. One well placed blow to my head and I was out, my last sensation the way my skull whacked against the sunflower-printed tile. A sharp prick at my arm and I was out, floating on blackness, a warm fog that felt oddly comforting. I could still hear bits and pieces of conversation. I remember a woman’s low voice, a warm palm on my forehead. I remember rolling around in the trunk of a car, unable to move. I remember wetting myself, hog-tied and unconscious, the warm piss turning cold almost instantly.

  I remember Juliette, the first kind face in a sea of people who said they were my family, but who treated me like I was the enemy.

  I remember being held down by my brothers, people I didn’t even know, as Gypsy Brothers was tattooed all the way across my back, a brand to make sure I could never be anything but his son from that moment on. As my father watched proudly, my mother’s blood still under his fingernails, I yelled until I was hoarse.

  I remember the way she crept into the room I was interred in afterwards, my beautiful Juliette. My eyes fell on her and I knew she was something else. Something I didn’t want to hurt. Something I wanted to keep safe.

  Ironic, then, that it was she who kept me safe. Wiped away the blood on my back, scrubbed my mother’s dried blood from my palms, brought me clothes and a soft blanket to wrap around myself.

  I remember my father had eventually tried to apologize to me, in some bizarre way. The word sorry never passed his lips, but I could tell even he was kind of shocked at what he’d done. I listened to his rumination about my mother, about how she’d stolen me away, and a film of ice began to form over my heart.

  I looked at the man who’d helped create me, and I saw a monster.

  When he was done trying to justify his actions, he fell silent. Waiting for me to respond.

  “How the hell did she ever look at you?” I asked him, eventually. “That’s the part I don’t understand. How the hell did a woman like my mother ever get involved with somebody like you?”

  My dad set his jaw, ran his hand through his hair.

  “Who said I gave her a choice?” he replied, and I’m pretty sure that was the most honest thing he ever said to me in my entire life.

  I settled into my psychotic family, a sleeper agent of sorts—somebody who knew he was powerless to take immediate action, but who understood that vengeance is a long game, not a short one. I assimilated—eventually—and my father thought I’d accepted my fate of being his son.

  I accepted nothing. I learned to ride the motorcycle they bestowed upon me. I wore the leather cut, bore the tattoos they insisted on marking me with, and I did as I was told, all the while waiting for the moment when I’d be able to turn on them all and destroy my demented family from within. A ticking time bomb, I was, and it was the thought of avenging my mother’s senseless murder that fueled my existence.

  I didn’t mean to fall in love with Julz. I was only a kid, and she was even younger than me, but from that very first night when she crept into my room, green eyes open wide with pity and shock, she was mine. I fell hard, I fell instantly, and I vowed that her fate wouldn’t match my mother’s because I would protect her.

  And yet, less than a year later, I was watching—and screaming�
�as my brother Chad smacked his hand over her mouth and raped her. He was the first, but he wasn’t the last—my father saved that for himself. Tied her to a chair, naked and bleeding, and interrogated her, for betraying the club, along with her father.

  The night before it happened, before my Juliette was murdered, I’d climbed a mess of tangled vines to sneak through her bedroom window. Her father was already planning his betrayal of the club, and we had front row tickets to get the fuck out of LA and away from the Gypsy Brothers.

  We’d been inexperienced, fumbling teenagers—she more so than me—and we’d almost had sex that night, but I’d stopped. I want it to be special for you, I’d said to her. I didn’t want to take her virginity in secret in her bedroom. I wanted it to be special. I wanted her to feel loved. I could wait, I told her. I’d wait forever for her.

  And then, the next day, I watched as my brothers took that from her, the very thing I’d been trying to protect. As they raped her and beat her and laughed as she cried.

  She hadn’t done anything wrong, except be born to a father who would try and betray mine.

  She hadn’t done anything wrong, but they still destroyed her, hour by hour, brother by brother, until all that was left was a naked, bloody, unconscious girl with the ligature marks on her wrists that told the story of her torturous end.

  They killed my mother, and then they killed my girl. My Juliette.

  I think my father knew, then, when he returned from the hospital to tell me of her death, that I wouldn’t cooperate with his fucking depravity anymore. I went wild. I beat him to a fucking pulp, and he let me, because I think he was reeling from the destruction he’d just enabled upon a girl he claimed to love as the daughter he’d never had.

  His shock didn’t last long, though. It quickly morphed into how to make my punishment most fitting for betraying my brotherhood and trying to get out with Juliette.

  My father locked me away for three years after he killed Julz.

  Three. Fucking. Years.

  There’s a house—a walled, gated compound, actually—on the north side of the American / Mexican border my grandfather owned. When I awoke, after my father told me Julz was dead and then tasered me, I was in a nine-by-nine foot cell, smooth limestone walls that would become my only companion.

  My father visited me every day at the beginning. Together with my eldest brother, Chad, he gagged me with one of my socks and tied me to a chair, in front of a table that held a small TV and VCR.

  My father, his face grim and set with determination, made Chad leave once I was secured. I struggled against my ropes as my father brought a girl in, dressed like a hooker in tight shorts and a strapless bodice thing that pushed her tits up and together. Her name was Starla, I remember, because she took that strapless thing off, and her shorts, until she was completely naked save for gold stars pasted onto her nipples.

  I’d just watched my girlfriend be raped and murdered by my family, and I was in catatonia. Even if I’d wanted to be turned on, which I didn’t, my body didn’t even register that a naked chick was standing in front of me.

  Not.One.Iota.

  She looked around, a little unsure, until her eyes landed on my father.

  “I’m not sure about this …” she said slowly.

  Dornan chuckled, pulled a gun out of his waistband and held it to her temple.

  “Get sure,” he snapped. Her eyes went wide, as they do when you hold a gun to somebody’s head. I watched on, detached from their interaction, as though I wasn’t even there. Even then, even before the depravity of the hole, I was already beginning to go insane.

  I closed my eyes as she knelt between my open knees, her trembling hands reached for my belt buckle, opening it, unzipping my pants.

  No.

  Suddenly, the room was filled with the blaring of a girl’s unmistakable screams. A girl begging. My eyes flew open, and I nearly choked on the fucking sock in my mouth as I saw what horror was unfolding on the screen in front of me.

  I’d been so fixated on stopping my brothers from attacking Juliette that I’d barely noticed my father recording the entire thing.

  And now he was playing back her brutal rape, for me to watch, while a girl knelt in front of me and reached into my pants.

  When the video came on, she jumped, pulling away from me as the sound of Juliette’s anguished sobs filled the small room. Thank God, I remember thinking as she recoiled from me. I knew she’d been reaching for my cock, and I couldn’t bear the thought of her touching me, video or no video.

  I closed my eyes and roared around the sock in my mouth, thinking that at least if I could make enough noise, at least if I could close my eyes and retreat somewhere safer inside my mind, that I wouldn’t have to hear Juliette screaming for my brothers to stop.

  Something hard and metal smacked against the back of my head. I opened my eyes reflexively as I felt warm blood ooze from my scalp. My father stood over me, having just pistol-whipped me across my skull, and over the video I heard the click of him cocking his revolver as he placed it against the girl’s head. With his other hand he fisted her hair, dragging her back to her knees in front of me.

  “Do it,” he growled. “Get him off. Or I’ll shoot you in the fuckin’ face and leave you down here with him to rot.”

  She started to cry. No doubt she’d been picturing something a little easier when she agreed to come down and blow a Gypsy Brother.

  I still remember how cold her fingers were when she grabbed my cock and brought it out into the air.

  “Suck,” Dornan commanded.

  My senses were on overload. There was the cold hands on my cock and her hot breath and the video and the fucking gun, and I didn’t know what to do.

  Her mouth on my cock was revolting. It was like a leech, sucking on me. There was no pleasure. My body didn’t even begin to respond to her. My cock stayed limp, despite her best efforts, the way she used her hands and mouth and tits to try and turn me on. She cried the whole time, her tears only making my cock slide in and out of her mouth with greater ease, but I stayed limp, because what the fuck was there to be turned on about?

  After what seemed like forever, she stopped; I heard a pop as she released my soft cock from between her lips.

  “I just want to leave,” she said to my father. “I promise I won’t tell anyone.”

  “No. Keep going.”

  She tried again, pulling out all of her best tricks. She tried to straddle me, to fuck me, but my cock was too useless for her to even maneuver it inside herself. And all the while, the video played in front of us, a ghastly backdrop for the punishment being meted out.

  “It’s not working!” the girl hissed at my father. “Please, don’t make me keep going. He doesn’t want it.”

  I was shaking. Vibrating. All I could hear was the pulse of my own blood in my ears as my heart thundered along, trying to protect me from the recorded sound of Juliette’s pleas.

  My father sighed. “Fine. But I’m not paying you. You didn’t finish the job.”

  As he left the room with the girl, her mascara all over her pale face and her hair mussed up, I was still thinking that I’d be able to wait him out. That I’d never fall into his madness.

  Then the girl screamed, a gunshot rang out, and something heavy hit the ground on the other side of the door.

  He came back into the room, stepping over her dead, naked body to do so. I still remember the way the stars she’d pasted over her nipples glinted in the harsh fluorescent light that hung in the hallway.

  “It’s so hard to find decent help these days,” my father said, reaching down and pulling the sock from my mouth as he laughed.

  “Why?” I cried. “You didn’t even know her!”

  “It was never about her. It’s about you. You will obey me, Jason,” he said calmly. “You will obey me because I’m your father.”

  “I don’t want to be your son!” I roared, and he smiled.

  “You will,” he said. “When you realize your only w
ay out of here is to start acting like my son, you’ll want me to be your father.”

  “I’ll never call you my father. Never.”

  His dark eyes bored into me as I tried to forget the dead girl in the hallway, her blood puddling underneath her and spreading until it was almost at my toes.

  “You think I won’t break you,” Dornan murmured, “But I’m a very patient man.”

  The next day I watched the video, pretended I was somewhere else, and groaned in agony as my balls screamed in pain and I came inside the girl who’d been bouncing on my red-raw cock for over an hour.

  It wasn’t pleasurable.

  It wasn’t good.

  It was a fucking nightmare, one that would be repeated daily, for three years, until I stopped resisting and started fucking and choking every single girl that passed into the dark hole I was imprisoned in.

  But that didn’t matter to my father.

  All that mattered was that I learned to obey.

  All that mattered was that I learned to be his son.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ELLIOT

  I love Juliette, but I fucking hate her right now, too.

  But really, I can only blame myself, can’t I? I’m the one who went along with her plans, back in the beginning when she was winning against the Gypsy Brothers. When she was cutting them down, one by one. I protested at every turn, but I’m no innocent bystander in all of this. I was a willing accomplice. I got her the drugs that killed Maxi. I personally crafted the multiple dirty bombs that she used to kill two brothers and injure two more. I told her she had to stop, and then I handed her everything she needed to keep going until she ended every one of those motherfuckers.

  And now, we’re in the aftermath. We’re fucked, to put it plainly. Amy hates me, my little girl is turning into a freaking basket case, and the DEA is riding my ass to work for them in exchange for the ‘favor’ they did for all of us in Furnace Creek. The favor that cost us all our freedom. Juliette and Jase are lethal, but they’re obviously too volatile, because all the DEA wants from them is their testimony against Julian Ross and the Gypsy Brothers MC. They’re not asking them to join the ranks of law enforcement. No, they’re just trying to make sure Juliette doesn’t get an itchy trigger finger and find the remaining Gypsy Brothers just so she can waste them all.